Michael Blazek

Consulting CTO | Product Expert

Living in Munich, Germany German native, fluent in English Available for freelance projects

CTO and SaaS startup founder with 10 years of experience building successful digital products and teams. I support growing companies, startups, VCs, corporates and incubators in realizing their product visions and setting themselves up for success.

What I do

As an independent consultant, I support companies – and particularly startups – in building amazing, scalable products. This includes setting up efficient engineering and product processes, setting the tech vision, choosing technology, and leading product teams. In particular, I can help you in the following areas:

Interim CTO

If your CTO has left the company (or you just haven’t found one yet), I can act as your Interim CTO. Depending on your needs, this can include e.g. defining the tech and product vision, fixing broken processes, planning architecture or introducing modern DevOps practices.

Scalable Infrastructure & DevOps

Setting up your product infrastructure in a resilient, scalable and secure way is a must-have for any tech-enabled company. I can help you move to a future-proof infrastructure setup, introduce modern DevOps practices and prepare for further growth.

Tech & Product Due Diligence

If you are a VC, I can help with the product and engineering parts of the due diligence process. Having been on the startup side of multiple due diligence processes, I know how to ask the right questions while not creating too much overhead.

Building Engineering/Product Organizations

Building winning and healthy teams is challenging – especially in a startup context where resources are often very limited. I can support with planning and building engineering & product organizations that work in cross-functional teams, with setting up hiring strategies and evaluating external teams.

Special Projects and MVPs

I can support by leading product & tech projects that require special care and close management attention, such as the launch of an MVP for a new product, confidential projects or projects related to sensitive data protection issues.

Enhancing Products with Machine Learning

Often, companies already have lots of valuable data that can be leveraged to build new, ML-enabled product features with significant impact. I can help evaluate use cases, build proofs-of-concept and turn these initial experiments into production-ready features.

My Background

Digital products are my passion. I enjoy building them, managing them, designing them and building organizations around them. Being a co-founder and former managing director of enterprise SaaS startup and market leader Talentry, I have over ten years of experience in software engineering, product management, design, leadership and entrepreneurship.

In my role as Chief Technology Officer, I have been responsible for all aspects of the product, from strategic business and product vision to technical execution and implementation projects at large corporations. Here are some examples of what I have been doing in my past:

  • Co-founded and successfully built up Talentry, a leading and growing cloud software company in the talent relationship space with international enterprise clients such as Vodafone, Henkel, Universal Music or Axel Springer
  • 8 years of experience as CTO & managing director building enterprise-grade SaaS products
  • Strategic planning and execution of both company and product strategy
  • Direction of system & software architecture for rapidly evolving, highly-scalable, configurable multi-product SaaS platform
  • Technical implementation of product vision, from hands-on coding to building and directing cross-functional product and engineering teams
  • Evaluation, development, and deployment of machine learning models for user behavior prediction and exploratory data analysis
  • End-to-end hiring of various roles like Tech Leads, VP Product, Fullstack Developers, DevOps Engineers, Designers, Product Managers
  • Planning and handling of multi-million euro budgets

Work

Independent Consultant

Since 2020

Co-Founder, Managing Director & CTO

Talentry GmbH

2012-2020

Software Engineer

jambit GmbH

2010-2012

Software Engineer

BMW Forschung & Technik GmbH

2009

Student Support - Machine Learning

Sony Deutschland GmbH

2007-2008

Education

M.Sc. in Computer Science

Technical University of Munich

2009 - 2012

B.Sc. in Computer Science

Technical University of Munich

2007 - 2009

Certifications

Machine Learning Engineer

Udacity (Nanodegree)

2021

Machine Learning

Stanford Online & Coursera

2020

Artificial Intelligence

Udacity (Nanodegree)

2018

Tech & Tools I work with

DevOps

Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, DataDog, Elastic Stack, Elasticsearch, Kafka, Spark, Cloudflare

Languages & Frameworks

JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, PHP, Java, Symfony, Django, Flask, next.js, React.js, Angular, React Native

Architecture

Domain-Driven Design, TDD, Monoliths, Microservices, Micro Frontends, REST, Event-Driven Architecture, CQRS, Event Sourcing

Machine Learning & AI

Jupyter, SageMaker, Numpy, Pandas, MLOps, Databricks, Neural Networks, Deep Learning, Linear & Logistic Regression, XGBoost, Anomaly Detection, PCA, KNN, k-means

Product & Design Tools

ProductBoard, JIRA, Confluence, Miro, Sketch, Figma, Photoshop, Illustrator, Zeplin, Abstract, Balsamiq, Litmus, Metabase, Matomo Analytics, Power BI, Google Analytics, Amplitude

Product Methodology

Vision & Value Workshops, Design Sprints, Vision Mockups, Agile Roadmaps, Lean Startup & Lean Analytics, Business Model Canvas, Problem/Solution Interviews, Scrum, Kanban

Want to get in touch?

Let's connect on LinkedIn, I am excited to hear about your current challenges!

Michael Blazek
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